bummer! But I'm not surprised because BF has been dragging this out for years!
CMBB is one of my favorite games and I was looking forward to Combat Mission campaigns!
http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=86356the post at BF:
From the post:
I regret that I have had to cancel thedevelopment of Combat Mission Campaigns, at least in its present form,and possibly in any form.
What went wrong
CMC was a major undertaking, and I certainly underestimated how long itwould take to develop. I was probably way too ambitious. Just buildingan interface to CMBB was one thing, and a tricky one at that, giventhat CMBB had not originally been designed with that end in mind. Butas well as that there was an engine that enabled 'relative spotting'for each commander, given the reports that he would have access to fromhis subordinates, including communication delays and so on. I had neverseen this done before in a comprehensive way, for any game orsimulation, and it caused some considerable complexity.
CMC was designed to be a 'grognard's dream', with every aspect of WWIIwarfare included at some level. It has a very sophisticated supplymodel, air forces, weather and 9 different ground conditions withassociated (2D!) graphics, artillery support, tactical reserves,entrenchment, etc, etc. There is a ridiculously large code basehandling everything from medals to soldier promotions to strategic AI.
The problem is that it took too long to develop, and the core engineproved unstable and difficult to fix. I find myself in the positionthis New Year of having something that is arguably 99% done, and yet wecannot nail the key bugs which prevent release (and no one wants torelease something that is deficient). Just like the same time lastyear. And the year before that.
There have been some talented people dedicate work to the project, onlyto leave for a variety of reasons throughout (better career, familytragedy, etc). Each time this happens, on such a small team, it causesdisruption and complication in new people coming up to speed. Itgenerally takes some months for them to be at peak productivity.
Unlike most major commercial titles, but similar to CMBB, this wasdeveloped on a 'shoestring', without the support of a major backer.That means that it cost me personally the bulk of my life savings andmy earnings over the last few years. I have run out of passion forworking on it, and money to fund it. Keeping one or several programmersbusy simply from the funds I personally earn in the computer industryhas been possible, but increasingly painful.
It has been clear for some time that any proceeds from the sale of thegame would not meet the expenditure. Nevertheless, I persisted with itbecause I did not wish to see the effort go to waste, I wanted toprovide something entertaining, and I am very, very stubborn.
Work ceased over a month ago now. I already feel better, like the manwho stops hitting his head against a wall. Apologies for not releasingnews of this earlier, but there are some processes.
Apologies and Thanks
I lend my apologies to the fans who wished to see the kind of campaign system that CMC was intended to provide.
Thanks to the beta testers who helped out, creating maps, campaigns, providing feedback, testing buggy software, etc.
An even greater apology to those who volunteered time and effort tohelp with manual development or graphics. Especially so, Marco Bergmanwho personally created THOUSANDS of graphical images covering units,vehicles, interface, etc. I feel badly for someone who has worked sohard voluntarily and does not even see the title released. And therewere others.
Battlefront, through Martin and Charles, have put a lot of effort intothis game as well, while pushing forward with their other titles.
The Future
As promised, we have made the source code and other assets availablefor the community. Too much work, sweat and blood was invested by toomany people to let it simply vanish. And who knows, maybe there areskilled individuals out there who have the time and energy to take whatwe have and lead it to a conclusion.
The source code and other files have been uploaded and are available as an open source project from sourceforge.net here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmcampaignsIf you are interested to become part of the project, please feel free to join the sourceforge.net project.
There are two important things to note:
- the files are released AS IS. There is a set of documents releasedand downloadable from sourceforge. That is all the documentation you'regoing to get. There will be no further support for this project from us.
- all files are released under the GNU GPL Copyleft license. This meansthat not only are they open source, any derivates based on them have tobe open source, too, and may not be commercially exploited. We stronglysuggest that you read the GNU GPL 3.0 license text (it's availableunder the "Documentation" tab on the sourceforge project) to avoid anynasty misunderstandings about this in the future.